Monthly Archives: March, 2012

Do you ever wonder what literary internet gals grouse about over their coffee? (OK, I didn’t think so, but bear with me a minute anyway.) This morning fellow blogger Elizabeth hit me up over Gchat with the Huffington Post’s Good Books Every Woman Should Read, and we both fell into similar reveries, over our respective […]

We’ve all heard it a million times: Publishing pays pretty miserably. Unless you’re a high-profile editor or in the C-suite, nobody who works in the the production end of the literary world (or any other end of it, in fact) is getting rich. Even your senior editors probably still have roommates, and forget about the […]

… I think I see what you’re missing here. All this time you’ve been thinking small, portable, handheld, modular, when all along the general public has been yearning for a brocaded lampshade. The above book reader of the future comes from the April, 1935 issue of Everyday Science and Mechanics. And the folks at Boing […]

I am behind schedule. On pretty much everything: blog posts and Web code and returning phone calls and replying to email. This is partly because my husband is out of town and I have three children with a shocking number of social commitments; partly because my son is, as ever, sick (if someone within a […]

A field of three is all dynamic tension: no sure thing, no dark horse. Which is what makes The Story Prize such a good competition—three short fiction collections, no particular agenda. With three nominees you can’t hope for an even distribution of anything, so it might as well just be about the writing. This year […]

Happy Vernal Equinox to all our readers! Usually this would be an occasion for a sigh of relief, signaling at least the thought of the end of winter in sight. This year, having had no winter to speak of—one freak blizzard just before Halloween that immediately melted, one lovely little snowfall in January that did […]

The longlist has been posted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, which will be awarded May 14. This one is always a good go-to source for reading outside the box, assuming you don’t habitually read novels in translation that were first published in Europe—and if you do already, then more power to you. I always […]

Ask for a book recommendation that will help ease your Mad Men withdrawal and it’s a safe bet that someone will mention Richard Yates. (If you Google “Mad Men Richard Yates,” you’ll get 119,000 hits.) And Richard Yates is fabulous — if you haven’t read Revolutionary Road, you should. (Skip the movie. Read the book.) […]

OK, so what’s the opposite of faint praise? We’ve all read the reviews that are stretching for something—anything—positive to say about a book: it’s un-put-downability, how faithful the translation is, how nice the binding, how sumptuous the cover stock. But what about the really meaty compliment, the one that sends a reader immediately clicking, or […]